The wait has been long. Very long. It was in May 2019 when WebRender was activated for the first users of Firefox, some who, logically and unfortunately, did not use Linux. It is true that we could activate it manually, but it is not exactly the same. In any case, the light at the end of the tunnel begins to be seen, and it does so with the launch of Firefox 84 which occurred a few moments ago.
And it is already known since the launch of the beta that WebRender It would be activated for the first users in Linux, more specifically for those who use GNOME / X11 in Firefox 84. The new release comes with other new features, but, however striking they are, and they are not, they should remain in the background if we take into account that what they have activated today is something that we have been waiting for more than a year and a half.
Highlights of Firefox 84
- Native support for macOS devices built with Apple Silicon CPUs brings dramatic performance improvements over the non-native build shipped in Firefox 83: Firefox starts 2.5 times faster and web applications are now twice as responsive (based on SpeedoMeter 2.0 test).
- WebRender is deployed on MacOS Big Sur and Windows devices with Intel Gen 5 and 6 GPUs. Additionally, there will be an accelerated rendering channel for first time Linux / GNOME / X11 users.
- Firefox now uses more modern techniques to allocate shared memory in Linux, improving performance and increasing Docker compatibility.
- Firefox 84 is the last version to support Adobe Flash.
- Various security fixes
Firefox 84 It is now available from the official Mozilla website, which we can access from this link. From there, Linux users will download the browser binaries, while the new version will arrive in the repositories of the different Linux distributions in the coming days. The version will also be updated soon Flatpak and Snap. And for the lucky ones, to WebRenderize!
